What a museum's decade-long transformation taught me about hospitality, culture, and the courage to do better
There's a moment in Micah Parzen's story that stopped me cold.
An 86-year-old woman, visiting from Wisconsin with her family, sat down on a bench in the middle of an exhibit about race. She told Micah she'd grown up prejudiced. That's just how her family was raised. And then she said, "I finally get it. I'm 86 years old, and I finally get it."
That moment didn't happen because of a great marketing campaign or a slick rebrand. It happened because the Museum of Us, then the San Diego Museum of Man, spent years doing the hard, uncomfortable work of looking at its internal culture honestly.
That's the session from the ECHO Conference, hosted by Tessere, that I want to talk about today.
The Session in Brief.
Micah Parzen is the CEO of the Museum of US in San Diego. He walked us through what it actually looks like to transform an institution’s internal culture, not with a strategic plan, but with a genuine reckoning.
The museum's history was not clean. It included pseudo-scientific racism, the forcible removal of Indigenous peoples from their own land, the display of sacred ceremonial garments as a fashion show, and decades of representing communities through a colonial lens. Micah didn't skip past that history. He leaned into it.
And from that reckoning, something real emerged.
Key Insights That Stayed with Me.
Words are not neutral. Inclusive language Matters.
One of the most concrete things the Museum did was change its language. "Collections" became "cultural resources." "Artifacts" became "belongings." "Human remains" became "ancestors." These weren't cosmetic shifts. They changed how the team thought, how they prioritized, and how Indigenous communities experienced being in partnership with them. Inclusive language is a policy choice. It signals who matters.
Internal culture is the product.
The Museum introduced flexible holidays so employees could opt out of colonial or patriarchal observances. They created "community-centered leave," three paid days for employees to build community, however they defined it. They capped the pay ratio between the highest and lowest paid employees at 6:1. They reimbursed board members for participation costs, including Indigenous trustees who were being asked to undertake enormous emotional labor. None of this was a perk. It was a value statement delivered in action.
You have to bring the community along, not just announce change at them.
Micah was honest about a mistake: they launched a name-change survey before building the case. The community pushed back hard. His lesson? Tell people why first. Then ask what they think. Then come back with options. The sequence matters.
Reckoning builds trust. And trust attracts resources.
After the Museum committed $3M from its reserves to scale Indigenous repatriation work from 3 to 14 staff members, they received a $4M estate gift, from a former curator who had updated his will after the name change. Micah believes that kind of alignment happens when you take the leap and the universe meets you.
At SSA, we'd call that a little luck. And we believe in it.
My Take, Through the Lens of 452 Hospitality and One Revenue Strategy.
What Micah described isn't separate from hospitality strategy. It is hospitality strategy.
At SSA, 452 Hospitality is about creating special moments that have lasting impact. But that only works if the people delivering those moments feel genuinely cared for themselves. You can't ask your teams to extend warmth and belonging to guests if the internal culture doesn't model that first.
One Revenue Strategy is about aligning every touchpoint across the guest journey, before, during, and after the visit. But alignment isn't just operational. It's fundamental to your internal culture. If your team, your board, and your partners aren't aligned on why you exist and who you're for, the revenue strategy becomes a tactic without a foundation.
The Maya Angelou principle Micah cited stuck with me: "Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better."
That's not a museum principle. That's a leadership principle. It lives inside everything we try to do through 452 Hospitality.
The Question I'm Sitting with.
SSA has always led from the inside out. Our story, built on relationships, family, and 452 Hospitality, is one I'm genuinely proud to be a part of. Micah's session reminded me that even those with strong internal culture must keep asking hard questions.
My job is to make sure we're telling that story with the same honesty and intention that we bring to our partners every day. Not just the polished version, the real one. The one that shows where we've grown, what we're still learning, and why that matters to the people we serve.
The outside can only follow when the inside is willing to move first. We're already moving. My question is always, are we telling that story well enough?